The government of the North African country looks for a bitcoin intern. The third-largest French bank Société Générale posted a job listing for an “IT developer on bitcoin, blockchains and cryptocurrencies”.
The capitalization of bitcoin economy may fall, but the number of institutions interested in the cryptocurrency and its underlying technology grows every day. Recently, two new organizations expressed their interest in bitcoin and blockchain specialists.
The first is the government of Tunisia, a North African country with 10 million inhabitants and, according to the World Economic Forum, the most competitive economy in Africa. Tunisian Ministry of Communication Technologies and Digital Economy posted on its Facebook page an ad for bitcoin intern. It looks for a postgraduate student who will assess the advantages and the drawbacks of bitcoin, analyse the impact of bitcoin on the banking system and find out the influence of different blockchain apps on private life, information security, liberty and transparency.
The ad provoked considerable interest on Facebook and on Twitter where it was publicized by Ola Doudin of BitOasis. However, many were unhappy with Tunisian government trying to get information for free instead of paying the intern or hiring a specialist.
But while the government of Tunisia is not yet ready to pay for bitcoin research, the French bank Société Générale (€ 1.3 trillion in assets) has no problem with it. It offers a 12-month contract for an “IT Developer on Bitcoin, Blockchains & Crypto-Currencies”. The person is to work in the London office of the bank, developing cryptocurrency protocols and gathering “quantitative information on what is really happening in the cryptocurrency world”.
In this way, Société Générale joins the ranks of the banks exploring the bitcoin technology. As CoinFox reported earlier, in April 2015 the Bank of New York Mellon announced that it started experimenting with the blockchain. In the same month, UBS, a major Swiss bank announced the opening of a technology lab to explore the potential of the blockchain. In June, a group of Swiss investors decided to register a separate bitcoin bank in Switzerland. Some days later, LHV bank Estonia and a Colored Coins software company ChromaWay AB created a new blockchain-based platform and a wallet for P2P transactions in Euros. In July, Barclays bank reached a Proof-of-Concept agreement with Bitcoin exchange Safello to create a bitcoin payment platform. And recently, the SWIFT institute in Belgium declared it would pay 15 thousand euros for a detailed prediction of the blockchain technology development.
